Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen the amount of income I make from blogging grow steadily. Some months now, it’s half my income. That can mean $5,000 a month or more from blogging.

How did I build a lucrative business as a paid blogger? Here’s how it worked for me.

1. Start my own blog, which became Make a Living Writing.
2. Promote my blog on Twitter and LinkedIn. Keep building my audience and learning about what makes a great blog post.
3. Ask existing clients if they need a blogger, using my own blog as a sample.  Entrepreneur magazine says yes.
4. I become their anchor blogger, posting three times a week. This was summer 2009.
5. Many small businesses approach me after seeing my Entrepreneur posts and ask me to blog for them as well.

I thought it would be enlightening to give those interested in earning from blog-writing fees a look at what it takes to earn a decent living as a paid blogger. The short answer is: Be able to write a lot of very powerful, well-linked, properly formatted, well-researched, short blogs. Never run out of story ideas.

Learn as much about the technical end of blogging as you can, so  you can show clients you know the ropes. At this point, I’ve used WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type, you name it.

Then, pitch high-traffic sites and try to get on as a regular, paid blogger. From there, if you’re writing well, other clients who need help from a professional blogger will begin to find you. If you can understand what they need to say and the audience they are trying to reach, you can grow your stable of blogging clients.

Here’s a breakdown of my blogging activity for a typical recent month. Without breaking any confidences by telling you what any specific client pays, here is the amount of blogging I do for paid clients in a month:

• 12 posts a month for Entrepreneur under my byline
• 22 or so posts a month for BNET under my byline
• 4 posts a month for a small-business-finance client, half-ghosted, half my byline
• 4 existing blog posts rewritten for the same client, to conform to good blogging style, add images, links, etc.
• 4 posts a month for another small-business-finance client – ghosted for business owner
• 12 posts a month for a collaboration-software startup, mostly ghosted for their team.

Total blog posts: 58

Total pay: $5,100

Gawd, I’m tired just looking at that blog total! No idea how I do it. This figure, of course, doesn’t count the posts about writing I create for this blog…so you can add another 8-10 posts a month there. To sum up, I’m a blogging fool these days!

My point in showing you this is that even at decent rates, blogging is a grind. You have to create a lot of blogs to earn well. A background filing on daily deadlines is definitely a plus.

My other point is to say, don’t blog for $10 a post. There are living-wage blogging jobs out there. Anywhere a company or publication needs to talk to a specialized audience, there’s an opportunity. Blogging really can pay the bills.

Yes, this isn’t that moonshot way of earning that so many are dreaming of, where you monetize your own blog and make six figures on autopilot. This is an everyday, working-class sort of way to earn from blogging. Simply helping publications and companies communicate powerfully with their readers and customers.

While I really love writing long features, I’ve also kind of fallen in love with blog format. It’s short, sassy, fun, and connected. Guess that’s why I’ve ended up doing so much blog work lately.

Want to get paid for your blogging? Learn how to earn more as a freelance writer in my new learning community, Freelance Writers Den. All-you-can-eat live teleclasses and Webinars, e-courses,  forums, and much more.

Photo via Flickr user Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Earlier this week, I answered some questions from freelance writer Lee Lefton about rates and how to find business-blogging clients. After I sent him links to some of my business blogs, he had some followup questions on how business blogging technically works:

I notice that most of the blogs have links. Do you do the research to find those related articles and then make sure they’re included? Do you write any of them?

Also, do you discuss with your clients what needs to go into each blog before writing? The company that wanted to pay $25 said that sometimes their clients had an idea what they wanted said, other times I could just “make it up.” These were attorneys!

And, are you responsible for the technical aspects of getting the blogs up, or do you just do the writing? I want to make sure I don’t get in over my head when I start doing this.

OK, taking these one at a time:

Most good business blogs contain links, in my opinion. They are what’s known as mashups — you take several recent pieces of news you’ve seen online and provide analysis of what they mean when viewed together. That’s your value-add that makes viewers want to come to the client site instead of those six other places — you’re gathering up their industry news and giving it to them in a comprehensive, insightful way.

I get these links by gathering links from my own Internet browsing and from Google alerts I set up to capture news on my business clients’ industry topics. I set up a Word doc I throw them in for future use, along with a key phrase to remind me what each link was about. Read 50 or so news stories on a topic daily and at the end of the week you will have more ideas than you can ever use!

Sometimes I do link to previous stories I’ve done, either for that blog or other outlets. Nothing wrong with that…kind of builds your credibility that you’ve been writing on the topic longer than five minutes.

I discuss at length with clients their goal, intended audience, voice, tone, and ideal topics for their blog. Some hand me an Excel spreadsheet of approved topics and ask me to prioritize and execute them. Others expect me to develop all the ideas on my own. Still others are somewhere inbetween. When those attorneys say “make it up,” Lee, I think they’re referring to the latter, that they would want you to develop some of the topics (not that you could fabricate the posts from your imagination!).

Physically creating blog posts and getting them up on a client’s site can happen a number of ways, and may require absolutely no special programming knowledge, or a good deal of technical expertise. I have clients I email my blogs to with the links in parentheses or included as hyperlinked words in Word, and they take it from there.

In other cases, I’ve been given access to a dashboard in their blog program via the Internet and can post my blogs directly within their system. In these cases, I compose the blog right in the program (copying over text from Word usually creates problems) and do the work of enlivening links so that they’ll be clickable to viewers on their site. I also have a few clients for whom I serve as photo editor for my blog, researching and selecting appropriate photos (like you see above) to embed in my posts.

In some cases an editor goes over my post, where in others, as I gain a client’s trust, they’ll give me free access to publish my posts directly to the site without review. If you get this…be responsible and proofread carefully!

Blogging programs I’ve used include WordPress (which you see in action here), Blogger and Movable Type. If you haven’t used any of these popular programs before, don’t freak out. It’s incredibly easy to learn the basics you’ll need for most blogging situations, and they’re highly similar to each other. Once you’ve used one, you’ll pretty much know how to use the others.

If you haven’t used any of the popular programs, it’s probably because you don’t have a personal blog. I highly recommend starting one to provide an audition piece for business blogging clients. The topic isn’t as important as having a blog that’s well-written and shows you understand the blog format. You’d be surprised how valuable a stepping-stone your own blog can be to get into business blogging.

If you’ve got more questions about business blogging, ask them below and maybe we’ll cover them in followup posts. Thanks for the thoughts Lee!

Photo via Flickr user Mykl Roventine: Out & About

This week I’m writing all about the world of blogging for business clients. I’ve been asked about this niche before, and recently got a bunch of questions on this topic from freelance writer Lee Lefton. Today, I’m going to talk about how to spot good business-blogging clients and what pay rates are out there.

As it happens, in recent months I’m earning more and more of my income from blogging for companies and online news outlets. Coming from traditional journalism, I never thought I’d enjoy blogging, but I’ve really grown to love this scrappy new format — and I’ve discovered there are some good-paying gigs in blogging, too. But clearly, that’s not been everyone’s experience.

Lee writes:

I recently had the opportunity to write a blog for two different clients. Both required 1,000 words or thereabouts. One client would provide some input, the other would require that I interview their customers or clients. The first had a budget of $25 per blog, the second, $35. Normally, I would attempt to negotiate, but I really didn’t see any room for that, so I politely declined both.

I’ve since spoken to a writer friend who does a lot of blogging and she said that was the going rate. I just find that very hard to accept. Would you be willing to give me an idea or a range of what you charge?

Let’s start by talking about what a good business blogging client looks like. First off, they understand the blog format — which is not 1,000 words long. More like 300-400 is considered the ideal.

Second, a good client understands that your regular blog entries have the power to potentially make their business happen. As a result, they want to pay a good wage so they can get a pro to write something exceptionally compelling. And $25 to $35 for 1,000 words obviously is not an appropriate wage, especially for blogs that call for interviews!

Third, good business-blog clients make a long-range commitment because they have realistic expectations and understand it’ll take time for the blog to build their traffic. My minimum contract for small-business clients is one blog a week for two months, for $1,000, and I’ve done several of those.

I don’t want to work on scattershot projects that won’t be successful, since I’m trying to build my reputation in blogging. One thing I’ve learned: Each business blogging client requires a huge initial learning curve where you don’t earn as well on an hourly basis, so that’s the amount at which I find it worth my time to get involved.

I’ve earned from $65-$300 for blog entries, depending on the situation, on the higher end of that where interviews were called for. Since I don’t take assignments below $50, I obviously do not agree that $25-$35 is the “going rate”! I think this format is too new to have a going rate just yet — rates are all over the place. It’s up to you to seek out the situations where blogs pay a living wage.

As with online articles, when you’re evaluating a blogging offer, the thing to keep in mind is NOT the per-blog price. It’s the HOURLY RATE. If it will take you 10 minutes to write the blog and you could crank out five in an hour, maybe $25 apiece is a great rate. I generally try to keep my per-blog rate around $100 apiece since I usually write blogs that take an hour or more to create. Blogs that require interviews obviously need to pay more.

The best-paying business-blog clients are in specialized business niches not everyone can write about. I’ve blogged about surety bonds, insurance, business finance, public companies’ SEC filings, and other dorky stuff for good pay. Identify your niche specialties, and then do in-person networking, or look at all the Web sites of companies in your target niche, find the one that needs a blog, and call them.

You’re looking for real-world businesses that sell a real product or service, or established news organizations that are moving online. They want strong posts that will make people hang around their site and buy from them, or their advertisers. If you want to make even more money, sell your blogging skill along with your knowledge of social media — that’s a great package of services that’s commanding good pay.

Later this week, I’ll talk about some of the technical requirements for blogging remotely for clients — the programs and techniques you’ll need to know.

Photo via Flickr user MyEyeSees